Cloudera Shows Off Its Grown-up, Enterprise Ready Hadoop #strataconf

Every Hadoop vendor wants to be king of the Enterprise. Why? Because that’s where the money is.

So it’s not enough to have the fastest, sexiest, most scalable and stable Hadoop distribution to win the e-Crown, more is needed -- namely, the ability to meet both business continuity and compliance requirements and to efficiently integrate with existing enterprise data management systems.

Enterprises demand this.

Cloudera Compliance, Continuity, Management

Cloudera, which claims to have more Enterprise Hadoop clients than its next three competitors combined, seems to inhabit this, but that doesn’t mean it is resting on its laurels. Today at the O’Reilly Strata Conference in Santa Clara, the Big Data category leader announced three industry-first advancements: Cloudera Navigator, Cloudera Enterprise BDR (Backup and Disaster Recovery), and version 4.5 of its market-leading management interface, Cloudera Manager.

Cloud Navigator

Taking them one at a time, Cloud Navigator was built to help Enterprises work with sensitive data to comply with regulations. It gives Big Data administrators and users the ability to secure data access, understand data structures, identify data sets and trace data lineage.

In simpler terms this means that Cloudera customers will now have easy access to functions like Audit “Who did what when?”; Access “Who can access this data?”; Discovery “What data is stored in the system?”; Exploration “What does the data look like?”; and Lineage “Where did this data come from?”

Cloudera Enterprise BDR

Cloudera Enterprise BDR (Big Data Recovery) was built to help enterprises meet their business continuity requirements. While all of Cloudera’s services that store data (i.e. HDFS, Hive, HBase) have mechanisms for replication and backup, until now there was no central way to configure and manage workflows or ensure that they happen in accordance with business continuity policies.

BDR’s functions include Central Configuration which allows customers to define backup and DR policies and apply across services; Monitoring which tracks the progress of jobs; Alerting which provides proactive notification of job failures or unexpected events; and Reliability which offers more robust backup and replication mechanisms.

Cloudera Manager 4.5

Cloudera Manager 4.5 is an upgrade to Cloudera Manager 4, the first end-to-end management application for Apache Hadoop. This release includes features like Rolling Restarts/Updates which performs updates and service restarts without downtime; ADVANCED MONITORING which creates and saves custom dashboards; SNMP Support which integrates Cloudera with other enterprise monitoring tools; NODE Templating which allows Enterprises to easily deploy and expand heterogeneous clusters; and Configurable "Phone Home"” that proactively send cluster stats to Cloudera Support.

Rolling upgrades are among the new managerial features

With the introduction of these advancements, Cloudera rolls out the red carpet to would-be clients, inviting them to come on board without needing to bring a paddle, wear a life preserver or even getting a smudge on their freshly shined shoes. It’s a bold claim to make, and without boasting, the team at Cloudera doesn’t shy away from making it.

Cloudera is Ready to Rumble

And, perhaps, for good reason. Their roster of employees reads like a Who’s Who in the World of Hadoop and includes Doug Cutting who wrote the original Hadoop distribution years ago. Not only that, but the company employs more than 50 Open Source committers who regularly contribute to the Open Source Apache Hadoop project.

It is for these and other reasons, that Charles Zedlewski, the VP of Product doesn't seem to be concerned about the ever-growing list of Hadoop competitors. “I’ll put our technology up against anyone else’s,” he says. He points out that more than 500 customers build on the Cloudera ecosystem, which is ten times more than the closest competitor.

And there’s one other thing. Because Cloudera has helped such a large number of customers get started and create wins with Hadoop, they can claim something no one else can. A wealth and depth of experience bringing the technology into the Enterprise. “If you encounter a problem or situation with Hadoop, chances are that we've seen it and solved it before,” says Zedlewski.

And a vendor with experience may be exactly who you want and/or need at your side when that time comes.